Friday, 5 April 2013

MAP updates, easter break, deadlines and moree ~

Time for another update, because it has been a while c:
It's been Easter break which means I've had no lectures and a lot of time on my hands for experimenting and practicing with animation techniques :3

First off, the MAP I talked about in my personal projects post was finished last week and everyone got their parts in this time, so it turned out awesome :D The person hosting it had real trouble getting the parts in for a few people, so the original animation crew got switched around quite a bit o: but I'm glad to see it complete c:

At the beginning of Easter, after playing around with experimental animation quite a bit, I decided to take a break from that and join another MAP, so I could improve my skills in flash. I had a lot of motivation for this project due to the fact that the MAP was based around one of my favourite songs and I was having a super productive week :D

My part was 11 seconds long and took me almost 60 hours to animate...proof that I need to practice speeding up the process a bit....and saving more often, after Flash crashed and I lost close to 4 hours of work xD but I'm really, really pleased with the outcome, probably one of my best animations to date and definitely one of the pieces I will be putting on my end of year showreel.
But yee, here it is

Once again of my dragon character Saffie, I payed quite a lot of attention to how the hair moved when she stopped, one of the things we were told recently in motion studies about hair/fur/clothing always following a few seconds after any major movement. I also looked at references of birds landing/hovering to find out how I should be animating the wings :3 Probably the first mini animation I've been able to focus my full attention to :D another reason easter holidays are great ^_^
There is still plenty I could find to improve this one, but for now and for a MAP at least, I'm quite happy with the finished piece c:

The Saga of Rex production blog that Michel Gagne is posting his progress in, has also proved quite useful lately, I've learned a new inbetweening technique which I will probably try out in the next MAP I join, or the next animation I do :D The blog has been a really great insight into the production of 2D animations and I'm really enjoying reading updates from it.

Another thing I've been able to do with the extra time is some more model making, I used to do this quite a lot, but haven't found much time since being at university, so I took a day out of my group project schedule to model the character Discord from the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series.

Basically this fellow here :3 I'm looking forward to the stop motion workshop I'll be doing once back too, and I guess modeling things is good practice for more hands-on forms of animation! I'm kinda trying to keep my fingers in all pies right now and not rule out any form of animation, I can't really think of a type of animation I don't enjoy doing, so until I've practiced a bit more, I don't want to narrow down and choose one to specialize in for next year c:

I took a few photos of the process I went through to finish this model, photos below :D

I started off by making the skeleton for the character, I used galvanized wire for the main frame and then thin florists wire to twist parts of the skeleton together, strengthen the overall thing and give the clay more grip for when I was coating it.

I began covering and getting the main shape of the character, covering up all the wire, but not adding too much detail this far, I used Fimo polymer clay for this as it is easy to use, doesn't require a kiln and bakes to become hard and plastic like. Plus, it is much, much less messy than clay!

I then worked on adding more details to the character, including claws, the tongue, beard, eyes, ears and hair. After doing this, I inserted two extra pieces of galvanised wire behind his shoulders, to allow for me to build wings on.

I baked him for the first time, meaning these pieces of metal stayed in place and then began adding extra details to him such as the horns and both sets of wings.

Once I had finished and was happy with all of the details, I cooked him for a second time, hardening up all of the details and allowing me to paint him.

I used acrylic paint to paint him, the only disadvantage I've really found with Fimo is that sometimes it is very difficult to get the paint to stick to it, so I have to use it quite generously, but other than that I'm pretty pleased with the finished project ^_^

The rest of the holidays have been dedicated to my motion studies and group project :3 I'll have some more stuff to put up about that at some point or another :D Including a walk cycle and a lipsync animation c: